Applying Image Stitching Technology For Exploring Paris

This is an amazing web page!
A group of imaging adventurers got together to put together a 26 GigaPixel image of Paris. The results are breath taking.

Go to the site at http://www.paris-26-gigapixels.com/index-en.html



If you have a mouse with wheel, your navigation is simple and instinctive. If you do not, you will need to use the on-screen navigation tool. This is a bit clunkier but does not diminish the experience much at all.

Not only did the team stitch together a breathtaking panorama of this wonderful city, but they also employ a texture dissolving technology that smoothly fades to closer and closer shots as you zoom into the image. This is a relative of the technology that was originally developed by Keyhole and that forms the foundation of how Google Earth works.

As you zoom in, you just keep getting closer and closer with the sharpness of the image restoring as the next texture downloads.

The result allows you to see which window sills need painting from on a building 3 kilos away!

The music they chose for this virtual tour is also striking. It is La Valse d’Amélie from the soundtrack of the movie “Amelie” (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain). The author is the French musician and composer Yann Tiersen.

Check out http://www.autopano.net/en/ for the company that provided the panoramic stitching software.

IMAGINING APPLICATIONS
They placed the installation up on the roof of the high-rise, nestled up among the antenna farms about three kilometers from London's new Olympic facilities.

The imaging array looked like dual 2 meter radar balls, except for the bristling collection of lenses that sprouted from each. Some lenses were telephoto, while others were wide angle, each lens feeding its light to a 25 megapixel image capturing chip.

In total, the 500 lenses from each ball provided a 260 degree wide, 100 degree tall, 25 gigapixel, stereoscopic panorama of the city that lay below. It captured a new image of the city every 30th of a second and in the time space between the image captures, a bank of GPUs (graphic processing units) processed the image into a massive 3D world you could fly around in.

The super video system had been conceived as a security measure for the 2012 London Olympic Games. It had since become a major tourist attraction in the burgeoning "virtual tourism" trade.

Privacy concerns had spawned some protests in the beginning, but those faded away as soon as crime statistics showed massively reduced incidents and increased arrests on west facing London streets. It was simply not a good idea to assault someone or steal a car under the glaring globes that somehow got dubbed SuperAnaCam.

Most of west facing London simply knew that they needed to draw their shades for privacy... To the Facebook generation, it simply seemed like another online exploration - although a new phenom developed with the tweeting of image location where you could to catch a "window show".

New installations were being planned in major and even minor metros, inspiring vistas, and other key locations around the globe. Rumors circulated that Google was going to buy the company and integrate the AnaCams into a real-time view on Google Earth.

This is Theo, imagining technology applications in REALLY high res.

Applying iPhone technology to webcast in record snow storms

The DHS Regional Homeland Security Science & Technology Summit was scheduled to take place at Los Alamos National Labs on Tuesday February 9, and at Sandia National Labs on Wednesday February 10, with over 700 web participants including international registrants from the UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy, France, Norway, Spain, Ukraine, Belgium, Ireland, Japan and Czechoslovakia

New Mexico had already been pummeled by a substantial storm on the prior Thursday and more rough weather was in the forecast. Los Alamos sits at 7,300 feet with travel up and down the mountain absolutely determined by weather.


Meanwhile back in Washington, D.C., the weather was shaping up to become a record buster. The news media were coming up with disaster branding, while the airlines were shedding flights. Key presenters and participants were starting to get mired in the mess.

Fortunately, TechApplication had been retained to WebCast the event. This meant that resources and technologies were already in place to use the internet to support the Summit. Over the weekend and into Monday, phone calls flew back and forth about whether to pull the plug on the entire event or not. In the end, it was decided to go ahead with the Summit as well as the WebCast. After all, as Mary Hanson, the DHS producer, for the event put it: "What kind of message would it send if DHS canceled just because of a little inclement weather." Ok, granted it was more than a little inclement weather, it was a real record buster, but she was right and certainly had the right attitude!

We already had the capability in place to simultaneously WebCast out of Washington DC . So with two channels at our disposal, we quickly came up with a plan to WebCast our key presenters from the Vermont facility in Washington on Channel 2, capture that WebCast in Los Alamos, and then composite the whole thing and re-WebCast the results to our worldwide online audience on channel 1. Easy as pie. Only we had never actually done that before. On the other hand, if everything was handled just right, there was no reason it shouldn’t work. We got everything ready and even managed a small test window, one hour before show time. In the technology stunt world, we like to call that a white knuckle rehearsal.

FLASHBACK. Diddle Dee, Diddle Dee, Diddle Dee... Schwing - we were reminded of the following movie scene:





Darn if things didn’t get worse in Washington! Word came down that all government facilities would be shut down on Tuesday. That meant, even if our scheme was going to work perfectly, no one was going to be able to get into the Washington facility to WebCast out.

It looked to me like we were all set to punt - without a ball. “iPhones! We can use iPhones as instant phone bridges”, enthused Nik, the project’s engineer.

Hmmm. Applying iPhone Technology to solve the problem.... He was right. The iPhone is a hybrid phone and audio device.We should be able to integrated it into the WebCast. Of course, we were on a mountain, in a snowstorm, with no access to Radio Shack, Frys or Best Buy! We would only be able to use what we had on hand.

A quick rumble through the cable box brought up the ubiquitous "AV cable". Everyone with kids and a camcorder has one of these! It has an 3.5mm 4 segment male jack on one end, and red, white and yellow RCA pin jacks on the other.

The only trick is the arcane knowledge that Apple did not pin the iPhone as you would expect. Surprised? Hey this is Apple... marchers to their own tune, drummers of their own beat!


So.... The red and white RCA pin jacks are not the Left and Right audio out of the iPhone with this cable.

INFORMATION TO NOTE:
The white jacks is AUDIO OUT - Left,
The yellow jack is AUDIO OUT - Right,
While the red jack (shown with an XLR adapter) is mono AUDIO IN - which we hooked to a mixer output back into the iPhone letting the remote presenter hear the moderator.
These are all "line level" signals and compatible with pretty much anything audio.
You need to mute the phone's mic to avoid feedback once the presenter is on line.

In the blink of an eye, we were integrated into the house audio and the Newtek Tricaster we were using for the event, and before your could say “Shouldn’t we try to rehearse this?” our first phoned in presenter was live on our worldwide WebCast, with the second on standby on iPhone #2.

The only real problem we had was the 20-30 second standard WebCast delay, which the presenters had to contend with. This caused mild hassles with their instructions to advance slides, and seeing the results, as well as a delay during Q&A sections. Otherwise, it was fantastic. The audio quality was great, the interaction smooth, and the event a success.

All we needed was a commonly available cable, and knowing how to plug it in. It was a real McGuiver experience. OK. That was the last obscure media reference in this posting!

This is Theo (and Nik) applying iPhone technology to WebCasts!